Whole heartedly agree with the above Holy Paladin feedback, don’t have much to add, except for that while the Holy Shock buff is nice, the buff essentially took it from pitiful to simply underwhelming. Our core spells need to feel like they’re enough on their own without relying on cooldowns or modifiers.
As for the Lightsmith changes:
Sacred Weapon is adding a considerable amount of damage in dungeons - yay! I think it still pales in comparison to the damage other classes are capable of doing. The splash healing from Sacred Weapon is less impressive, but that may have strictly been me not fully capitalizing on it
Actually using the Armaments spell is a chore and I need to remind myself to press it. Please think of a way to make it more deterministic and passive, Holy Paladin does not need an extra button
Edit:
Addendum to the above. Sacred Weapon, when properly utilized, is doing disgusting amounts of damage in dungeons lol. 100% expect nerfs. It was 50% of my overall in a heroic Rookery. The healing it grants is still very underwhelming, but that may just be because there isn’t enough damage in heroic dungeons for me to get the most out of it.
Actually the more I think about it, the more I feel they need to just remove Tyr’s Deliverance.
It does nothing beneficial long term for the spec and only exists as this point to block access to Reclamation and is only useful if you also get Boundless Salvation to extend the length.
If you don’t get Boundless Salvation, it’s a pretty useless spell.
Nice. I shall once again main my ret and have fun doing it if things keep up at this pace. Not fun having alts with lesser gear outdo a fully BiS paladin as has happened to me in the past. I’ll get back to no life ing this game all day everyday on a paladin if they truly are going to be as fun in the beta as they will be in TWW.
A mix of playing fun and playing well is what makes rets the best imo. And there seems to have been some more effort put into the lore and class design for this expac.
It’s basically an active merciful aura now. I think these two should be combined into one talent. A passive merciful aura heal for what it is now and then the active steroid for 20-30 seconds (outright remove boundless salvation) that also amps FL, HL and HS by the 10% for it’s duration.
This also can help remove further button bloat by giving an actual competitive alternative to blessing of summer.
Giving us a new capstone in place of Tyr’s and Boundless which IMO should have some form of DPS focus because of how bad our DPS is still. (Ashen hallow replacing consecration node please)
Just because I want it to have more FaceTime for potential devs reading. I really think shining righteousness node should change SotR to divine storm and remove the requirement for a shield.
The issue with combining them would be that as a result it would be increasing our passive healing which they have for 3 builds in a row trying to reduce now.
I’m not 100% happy with ability being now basically useless either, even for a caster build, but if that means our spenders and holy shock can get stronger then its a fair trade.
Edit: NVM thought you suggesting mergin Merciful + Tyrs, not Tyrs + Boundless. My bad.
Edit2: i would gladly take a 2H sotr equivalent like divine storm. Maybe be could go even further, blend consecration with divine storm you can take that extra button and have it be like Jade Wind Rush following monks. Even if it would be a dps loss, our dps is still 0 so.
Seconded, there’s a 2H Int mace from The Stonevault, which means it’ll be in our season 1 loot pool for the weekly vault. If they’re going to keep adding 2-handed int weapons to our loot pool, the shield restriction on SotR needs to go.
Adding to the topic of Tyr’s Deliverance, why not make it a passive? Our healing spells have a chance to grant the target Tyr’s Deliverance, and we can still extend the duration with Boundless Salvation. Just nix the spreading to allies part, and honestly, get rid of the +healing taken modifiers and just buff Holy a bit to compensate. I do agree with all the above posts that Reclamation needs to not be locked behind it.
Adding to the topic of talent nodes, I feel like there are some that are either frivolous, or outright ignored and could stand to be replaced/nixxed.
Glimmer Modifiers
We have:
Glimmering Radiance
Illumination/Blessed Focus choice node (I can’t think of a single reason anyone would ever run Blessed Focus)
Light’s Protection
Overflowing Light
Why on earth does Glimmer of Light need this many extra talents? Illumination should be baked in, Glimmering Radiance can probably stay, but the other 2 seem superfluous.
Saved by the Light
Highly situational at best, and even when you can proc it, it contributes very little overall
Power of the Silver Hand
Negligible, never worth the talent point, and locked behind Aura Mastery talents. Why? In Legion, we got it by virtue of it being in our Artifact tree, but it wasn’t something we had to go out of our way for. It was just there, and didn’t impact gameplay.
Breaking Dawn
Why is this still a 2-point talent? If you want it to be worth taking, make it a 1-pointer that turns Light of Dawn into an AoE rather than a frontal cone, or does some AoE in addition to the cone, and give it the extra range
I agree with this - with how heavily glimmer has been nerfed since last years rework, it’s clear they want to take power out of it but so many nodes are required to make it serviceable that it just gimps hpal because there’s no real alternatives in the spec tree.
Alternatively -
i think an option that should be explored is moving merciful aura’s to be a choice node with Tyr’s. This gives us the option to have a passive healing aura or the active, stronger version for burstier situations. As it stand, i don’t really want to play Tyr’s in keys but now we can’t get reclamation without it.
Blessed Focus is a trap talent especially since so much of our kit requires spreading glimmers around for various reasons. I’m certain somebody will tell me a use case where Blessed Focus is god-tier but I’m honestly not seeing it.
But yes, overall the amount of extra talents Glimmer needs to “feel good” and it still ends up feeling bad from a gameplay perspective because so much of Glimmers power comes from a) it goes on everything and b) procced by HS. So HS has to be terrible, so Glimmer isn’t absolutely busted.
Saved by the Light is stuck in the era where Beacon was an important spell. Now it’s just crutch and this talent is basically worthless.
I’ve never even taken Power of the Silver Hand because it was just more RNG, to maybe make an already bad spell hit somewhat better.
Breaking Dawn is honestly still in the tree for the same reason Divine Steed is still broken into Divine Steed still needs 3 talent points to not be terrible. Pure spite lol. They know nobody likes those talents but continue to shove them in our path so we either have to take some deranged pathing that hurts the specs or just grit our teeth and bare it because we literally have no other option.
Wanted to add most of my thoughts (updated for June 18 patch) into a single post.
i have zero issues with the current hero spec setups. I like the Lightsmith change to the weapon and feel like it is in contention with Herald now and offers some good utility in higher keys when things aren’t dying in less than 10 seconds. I for one, will be messing with this hero spec consistently as is.
Divine Favor change is great IMO - one of my biggest previous grips has been rectified and that was casting Tyr’s & HoD/DF after one another just felt horrible. 3+ seconds of cast prep in a key feels bad with how boss/trash damage profiles haven been. (one shotty) this adds a great alternative we can plan around with the Prism CD and will still extend Tyr’s the same amount over it’s duration with Boundless Salvation selected.
Holy shock buff was much needed and feels like it’s in a good spot - talenting LoTm and Bestow light, HS now crits between 500-600k base. including a 50-70k glimmers brings us to 12-13% of health pools at 610 ilvl. This might not sound great in theory but with our ability to rapid fire HS most of the time, combined with other modifiers, HS was doing between 20-30% of my healing in a few dungeons i did, with crits up to 2.5M with blessing of anshee.
one thing I’d like to note is i do find it odd that when we holy shock ourselves (with LotM selected) for direct heals it puts the absorb effect on us. Which makes HS use on ourself have reduced value by a pretty big margin. Not sure if this is working as intended.
I think Righteous judgement needs to have a 100% chance to drop consecration with an internal CD. Similar to Ret’s Consecrated blade. Having the RNG built in drastically reduces the value of this talent and i tend not to bother and opt for more consistent throughput options.
shining righteousness should be reworked to change SoTR into divine storm or an alternative to provide 2H hpals an alternative dps option.
overflowing light should be reworked, with how large our health pools are and how much glimmer has been nerfed since last July, it’s even further dead moving into TWW. Instead have glimmer have ally’s receive increased healing from our flash of light, holy light and holy shock. (see removal of boundless salvation)
breaking dawn should either be turned into a 1 pt talent with a 30 yard range or just remove the second point and leave at 25 yards so we can path through it more effectively.
delete power of the silverhand, it’s seen almost no use since inception.
Move merciful aura to a choice node with Tyr’s to give us a passive alternative and allow for players who don’t want tyr’s a path to get to reclamation. With the current state of Tyr’s it won’t be used in Keys but reclamation is now locked behind it.
boundless salvation - delete and add the extension part of this talent to tyr’s and add the healing benefit to overflowing light rework above.
switch the positions of awakening and blessing of seasons. This allows players who don’t like the seasons maintenance buff the option to still pick up awakening which is so important for both hero specs.
At this risk of being raked over the coals for “playing holy paladin incorrectly” I actually ended up taking Power of the Silverhand on beta during the M+ testing window. Now, I didn’t heal above 5s on beta (cause I don’t have anyone to do keys with, so it’s totally pugs and quite frankly I haven’t had the best experience in finding decent PuGs on beta), but with Power of the Silverhand I managed a few 2-3M crits and even a few 1.2+M non crit holy shocks which was super nice. The downside is that it’s yet another layer of RNG, I don’t feel that it procs much (honestly I didn’t notice). I only took it cause I didn’t taking Shining Rightenousness cause after the first 2-3 dungeons I came to the conclusion that on beta as I PUG I will be relegated to only pressing healing buttons + judgement lol, cause everyone seemed to ungubunga brain every ounce of avoidable damage.
Tyr’s should just be removed entirely and the healing % buff baked into FOL/HS/LOD/WOG.
100% agree if we’re going to be stuck with melee only DPS abilities (I WANT DENOUNCE BACK!)
Is the play here to just keep one of your beacon’s on yourself? I have a tremendous PTSD with healing absorbs after M+ in Legion when Power of the Silverhand would buff my holy shock (and I wouldn’t realize it) to the point that it massively overhealed a player’s health during Overflowing weeks (before it got removed). Without LotM and BSalv, my holy shocks (without all the additional rng modifiers) only crits for 200-300k range at 608.
Unfortunately beacon won’t heal through the absorb. It has to be a direct heal or HoT. So you’re better off putting a beacon(s) on someone else and doing the direct heal to yourself.
The only reason I left it in my suggestion was for players who prefer to cast to have some form of capstone. Personally, I’d prefer it was gone and we had Ashen Hallow in its place to modify consecration. As it stands we have no valuable DPS option in our capstone section.
I will unfortunately conform to the meta because I love the class fantasy and have played the spec for over a decade but ideally I would never need to use Tyr’s again. Locking reclamation behind it is my current grip.
As for Power of the Silverhand. I’m content with it staying if the PPM is increased or reworked to remove the RNG. RNG just doesn’t translate to high keys for throughput. If it’s not consistently there, other healing specs will continue to outperform us.
Addressing the Holy Paladin talent tree, it seems like Blizzard has two distinct play styles in mind: ranged healing and melee healing. You can see this dichotomy at play when you compare choice nodes like Avenging Wrath and Avenging Crusader. It’s been this way for several expansions now, and yet the melee play style always falls short and gets nerfed or neglected time after time.
Naturally, it should be possible to hybridize between these extremes, and I really like how the tree is evolving. However, rather than having these play styles compete for nodes and talents throughout the tree, there just seems to be a haphazard array of clashing choices available through out, and this makes specializing in melee as a Holy Paladin almost impossible when compared to the synergistic bliss of the ranged playstyle and its node options available to it.
I think giving Holy Paladins a melee build option is a great idea, but there needs to be more changes to make it as good as the ranged playstyle. Here are a couple of specific points that stand out to me as needing improvement:
Reclamation: This talent doesn’t work with Tyr’s Deliverance at all, is essential for the melee play style, and yet Tyr’s is required in order to unlock it. The positioning of this talent would make more sense if the capstone, Boundless Salvation, under Tyr’s Deliverance was a choice node. This could offer an alternative to Boundless Salvation that fits the melee-focused Avenging Crusader playstyle. For example, it could work with abilities like Crusader Strike, Shield of Righteousness, and auto-attacks instead of just ranged heals.
Barrier of Faith: This talent, which shares a node with Holy Prism, should work with talents that make Shield of Righteousness, Crusader Strike, and auto-attacks heal as well. Right now, it only works with ranged heals like Flash of Light, Holy Light, and Holy Shock. If you take melee-focused talents, there’s no point in using Barrier of Faith because it makes you stay at max range and cast Flash of Light instead of getting in there and doing melee healing.
Additionally, and I realize this horse has been beaten to death 100 times already, but 2Handers should be optional to use as Holy to offer more damage to the melee-healer play style, should it be desired. This would let us sacrifice a bit of survivability for a modest increase in damage. It would be a lot of fun and further distinguish these two playstyles, but melee healers should totally still be allowed to use a shield too!
not sure we can post links here but the development notes from yesterday. the Spell power coeffcient was increased from about 140% to 190%. so about a 30% ish(more i think) buff
I am probably going to be lambasted for this, but with the recent buffs i don’t think Holy Shock needs to do any more healing. It is actually outperforming other classes equivalent spells (which often have longer cooldowns as well) before accounting for Glimmer or any healing cooldowns. Add in Glimmer and it is one of the most powerful instant cast heals in the game.
I agree - i don’t have an issue with the throughput on HS right now, it’s in a good spot. I think the problems with the spec lie in the awkwardness of the spec tree and it’s talents now. There are some dead talents that need to either go or iterated on and some talents need to be repositioned but in terms of throughput I think the spec is fine/trending in the right direction.
The primary problem with this is that, from my testing, it really only hits those heights when it’s backed up by RNG procs, the aforementioned glimmer, and the plethora of talents required to buff it up.
The spell does basically nothing on its own. It’s always backed up by something else.
EDIT: To give it a comparison. When I cast Vivify on my MW, I’m aware of how well it will do at all times, and when I need to give it a boost to keep them from dying quickly,I know exactly what I need to do, with a very simple combo that consists of 2 or 3 instant cast abilities, depending on the circumstances and talent choices.
Meanwhile on Holy Paladin, while I have two charges of instant cast Holy Shock, the amount of healing it does depends on,
If the crit from Awestruck and Divine Glimpse want to be in my favor
If Power of the Silver Hand decides it wants to buff my next Holy Shock
If I’m specc’d into Martyr and I’m not in any actual danger
Glimmer
Almost none of these things we have actual direct control over. If I want actual control, I’d just not use Holy Shock and instead opt for Flash of Light or Holy Light, and even those you don’t get their most benefit on demand since you’re going to want to use them with Infusions.
Edit: I realized this post is not conductive to the purpose of this thread. So i’ve hidden the reply to the poster above.
Summary
Nothing exists in a vacuum. Every spell is backed up by a ton of things.
For example, in Ilvl 569, Swiftmend heals for about 245k. But when backed by thier mastery and all their HoTs and Grove Tending and Guardian of the Grove, it heals for 685k.
Riptide is in the same place, healing for about 250k (160k initial heal plus 90k HoT over 21 sec). But with Unleash Life, Earth Shield, on a target with little to no health, it heals for 627k (387k initial heal and 240k over 21 sec).
Penance heals for 300k (100k x 3). But with Castigation, Harsh Discipline, Premonition of Piety, Shadow Covenant and Power of the Dark Side, it heals for an astounding 1.9m non-crit healing. And lets not even get into Atonement or Contriton. The numbers get silly.
Reversion heals for ~165k over 15 sec and 15% of damage taken in the past 5 seconds. Seemingly with no cap. On myself it heals for nothing. Literally zero. On the healing dummies it heals for 139m.
Holy Shock heals for 125k, with no modifers. With just Reclamation and Martyr it heals for ~200-250k, but with Glimmer, Tyr’s Deliverance, Reclamation, Martyr, and Beacon(s), it heals for ~460k. With Blessing of An’she that healing goes up to 1.38m non crit. On a crit with Awestruck and Sun Sear that’s a 3.1m heal.
I would agree with that variance being too big.
Tyr’s Deliverance should probably go and its healing should be redistributed into our base kit. Then introduce some DPS related talents in its place.
An’she should proc more often but do way less extra healing (maybe 50% at 8ppm rather than 200% at 2ppm).
But Vivify has a ton of modifiers that causes its healing to vary wildly.
Random Mastery Procs.
Vivacious Vivification - Every 10 sec Vivify becomes instant and heals for 20% more.
Chi Wave - Every 15 sec Vivify does some AoE healing.
Save them all - 10% increased healing after healing a low health ally.
Invigoration Mist - Vivify heals all target affected by Renewing Mist.
Zen Pulse - Proc that causes Vivify to heal its target and all targets affected by Renewing Mist by an extra fixed amount
Tear of Morning - The Renewing Mist portion of Vivify’s healing is increased by 20%.
[Conduit of the Celestial Hero Talents]
Courage of the White Tiger - Vivify randomly (likely PPM) does a lot of extra healing.
August Dynasty - Jadefire Stomp increases the healing of your next Vivify by 50%.
[Mastery of Harmony Hero Talents]
Aspect of Harmony - Ton of extra healing after using Thunder Focus Tea.
Balanced Stratagem - Stacking healing buff.
Mantra of Purity - 10% increased self healing and an extra HoT.
Coalescence - 10% increased healing on target affected by Aspect of Harmony
That is a ton of healing modifiers, and a lot of them are uncontrolable. Courage of the White Tiger alone heals for as much as Holy Shock does.
And on its own Vivify heals for almost nothing either. About 185k in ilvl 569, which is about 5% of that characters total health. Barely any more than what Holy Shock does in similar gear, which is about 3.6% without Martyr or Reclamation.
